My baby loves the Western people

Jon Carroll
| on November 2, 2015

The West is defined by its aridity. Its immense, dusty landscapes of deserts, near-deserts and the occasional oasis can be incomprehensible to people who have just arrived here from the East, or from Europe.

It takes a while to grow into the idea of West. People are used to such gaudy attractions as Monument Valley or Death Valley — they’re almost movie stars — but the miles and miles of sweeping scrubland, of nothing, more nothing than the human mind can encompass, can wear on a person. If every direction looks the same, where the hell am I?

It’s not pretty in that old-style way. It’s not meandering, lazy rivers with big trees overhanging their banks, it’s not sun-dappled forest floors rich with the reds and oranges of autumn. It’s great slablike mountains, sparse and occasional trees, gigantic skies and deep canyons.

I spent some of my youth in Pear Blossom, near Palmdale, in a tiny house in the middle of a large brown desert. All day I ran around outside with two dogs, shooting at invisible enemies and flushing jackrabbits, who fled before my heroic footsteps. I think that experience made me a Westerner.

Years later, Tracy and I went backpacking in Joshua Tree National Monument. We hiked in the late, long twilight and set our sleeping bags on fine bottomland sand. The next morning, I was awakened, not by light or by noise, but by fragrance, the intense sweet odor of plants struggling to survive.

“Pick me,” each one said, spreading its impressive plumage. “My scent is sweeter. I will make many fine babies.” The insects buzzed in excitement.

The desert is not a dead place. Take a little time, sit on a rock, and the landscape comes alive. There are birds and rodents and beetles, crawling ceaselessly, always looking for food in this starved environment, always looking for that edge that makes another day of survival possible. The desert is alive with desperation.

I’ve been reading “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs,” a late collection of essays by Wallace Stegner. In “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” he makes the case that all of us should develop a consciousness of ourselves as Westerners, rather than as transplanted whatevers. Wherever we came from, we now live in a land where it rains, inconveniently, in the winter, leaving the growing season largely dry. Rain doesn’t help; most fields are fallow by then.

And being part of the West means recognizing that we live in an arid country. That’s easy to forget in the coastal littoral, where everything appears lush and unthreatening. But most of that greenery is water that we stole from someplace else. If you want to really understand the land, check out the East Bay Regional Parks.

They’re pretty; they have forested culverts and picturesque stands of oak. But the grasslands in between do not inspire confidence. Of course, with enough water, everything looks great, and you can cultivate roses 20 yards away from a straggly bunch of coyote bush.

And further eastward — the Central Valley was once a giant freshwater marsh. Indians paddled their boats over what is now downtown Fresno, and there was plenty of fish for all. But that was all water from the Sierra, and it was inconvenient for farming.

Two birds with one stone: Dam the rivers and send the water elsewhere, to the coast, where humans dependent on shipping gathered, where thirsty suburbs used a large amount of water, for drinking and hygiene and irrigating rare Amazonian strangler figs. This plan required an elaborate network of tunnels and canals, all of them subject to the same infrastructure decay as the rest of our fine Age of Optimism public works.

On the other side of the Sierra, in the rain shadow: real desert.

Drought is an utterly predictable part of living in the West. It happened in the late ’90s; it shouldn’t be a surprise. Global warming isn’t helping, because the Sierra snows fall more lightly and evaporate more quickly than they did even 50 years ago. If we’re going to be all, “I am shocked to learn that drought is going on in this establishment,” we’re kidding ourselves.

Already we are using more water than we have. If there’s a big rain this winter, we’re still going to be using more water than we have. We’re draining the aquifers of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. We are still an arid country; we just don’t act like it.

So accept your Westernness. You belong to the land of the pronghorn antelope and the cactus wren. The Grand Canyon is part of your heritage, as are the bubbling Yellowstone mud pots. The frequent hidden hot springs of the Great Basin; those are yours as well. Rejoice! Save water! Paddle a reed boat and gaze at the moon. It’s the beginning of a new life.

“Why, she,” said the Gryphon. “It’s all her fancy, that: they never execute nobody, you know. Come on jcarroll@sfchronicle.com